One of my biggest regrets of moving across the Atlantic is that I never went to a queer event or bar while I lived in London. Nor have I gone on any of my subsequent visits. It seems a shame since London has a TON of queer nightlife, but I’d rather, you know, queer evening life: let’s all go to the library and read comics, let’s all go out for bubble tea and thrift shopping, let’s have a potluck.

So perhaps it isn’t really a surprise that I’m engaging with the Columbus community much more enthusiastically than I did the London one: they actually do have potlucks, and open mikes, and discussion groups, and in all fairness I’m sure London had those things too but as from a emergent enby’s perspective it seemed to be a lot of expressing pride and identity through what Hannah Gadsby calls “the metaphor of party,” and I’m just really not a party animal.

When I told me queer friends in London – and a couple of the cishet ones too – they were VERY worried about how I’d be treated in a small midwestern city in the US; a city that consistently emerges as a sanctuary of blue in the middle of a sea of red during elections. They supposed I’d get beaten up, or yelled at in the street (both of which actually did happen to me in London), that I’d be unable to come out to my peers and professors, and that life would generally be conservative and terrible. I’d traveled to America a lot, but Columbus was strange territory, and I did spend a lot of my early time here making sure I played it safe, to the point that at least one of my grad student friends still thought I was straight a year after I’d arrived. Honey, no.

But it turns out that Columbus is actually a pretty fantastic city to be queer in. It’s so university dominated that a climate of academic liberalism prevails in many of the places that surround me on a day-to-day basis; the artsy area of downtown is flavoured by the nationally famous Columbus drag scene, and while a lot of the historically queer venues have struggled in light of gentrification the city seems quite happy to deck itself in rainbows. We’ve even got a Gay Street! (In fact Mike Pence came to speak on Gay Street and a whole bunch of LGBTQ folk turned up to throw him a very queer dance party… but that’s a whole other story).

I was not the first non-binary human to go through my PhD program, which made my professional transition a much smoother ride than it might otherwise have been. While I did have to have on pretty firm conversation with a professor about “they” pronouns as accepted Oxford Dictionary English, when I announced my pronoun change during an annual review meeting the only question I really got was “are you going to change your name with that, or are you still going by Fenella and Fen?”

Of course no amount of rainbows and good intentions can instantly overcome decades of acting as if there are only two genders in the world. But here’s what I have loved about the midwest: the only justification I’ve ever really needed for my identity is that it’s what’s best for me and makes me happier. There is such a cultural dedication to kindness in my communities that accepting a new gender and pronoun seems to be more normalized than treating someone in a way that’s been labelled harmful. I am NOT advocating for the “we’re all humans and we shouldn’t see difference” mindset, because that’s a terrible way to think and acts as a shield for all kinds of isms, but instead a more radical mindset that people should get to be the first authority on who they are and how they get to be treated.

Again, I want to place a caveat on this whole post acknowledging that in terms of “threatening” queerness I loom in people’s minds like a Labrador puppy, while some queers will be treated like wolves no matter how good their actions or intentions are. I present within an intersection of privilege that makes it easier for people to treat me kindly, and I know that many people are not going to be offered the same opportunity. If this post has a message I guess it’s that I wish more people would treat other queers the way they’ve been willing to treat me. Celebrate kindness, and spread it around.

Now comes the funny part: this very kind midwestern quest to get my pronoun right and understand my gender has led to multiple instances now of what I call “pronoun dreams.” Two ladies that I know of to date had visions of me in the night where I appeared to them as biologically male, and these dreams helped them understand the multiplicity of my gendered self in a way that reified why I take the pronoun that I do. The first time I apparently showed up in an immaculate tweed blazer, mustache, and spectacles, while the second time my boy-self came along to a group trip to the local outdoor pool. I love the idea that some part of myself goes out all night to advocate for gender equality, and I love the fact that the recipients of these dreams felt happy to tell me about them afterwards. If you’ve had a pronoun dream about me please let me know!

I think these dreams indicate something I’ve long believed, which is that there’s a difference between accepting someone’s pronoun and knowing someone on a fundamental level as genderqueer. Most people start off in the first place, but I’ve noticed that it’s the shift to the second place that signals a real fluency in my identity (and consequentially a really noticeable drop in misgendering actions/language). There’s a felt difference, in my experience, between the people who are calling me “they” because that’s what I say I want, and the people who call me “they” because that’s what they know I am. I don’t have any bad feelings about people who haven’t got to the second stage yet, but I wouldn’t mid a few more night visits if it meant that more people felt the reality of my identity instead of only the impulse to be kind.

So I appreciate all the folk in my local community who have approached my gender from the perspective of “how to be a good human being,” and I appreciate that for some people that’s shifted into a more ingrained knowledge of what a non-binary gender might be. I appreciate the people who’ve persisted in the labour of kindness even when that shift hasn’t happened. As I start to think about leaving the community where I’ve lived and worked and become a much happier human, I hope that wherever I go next will share that cultural sense of being good to other humans… maybe I’ll even inspire some more pronoun dreams.

Join me tomorrow, where I’ll talk about actually going to a queer bar. Hi-jinks ensue!

 

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